Complex Social System

From the viewpoint of problem solving, a complex system is a system whose behavior cannot be
easily predicted from inspection of the system. A complex
social system is
a complex system whose behavior is primarily the result of the
behavior of social agents. Examples are ant colonies,
families, and nations.

Why this is important

The sustainability problem is clearly a complex social system problem. Thus solution of the problem can borrow from the vast literature and practices of complex system theory.

Page 22 contains a highly educational table. Here's an abbreviated list of what's in the table. As you read it, consider how many of these characteristics of the sustainability problem are not being considered by popular solutions or the rationale behind them.

Dynamic complexity arises because systems are:

1. Constantly changing: Heraclitur said "All is change." What appears to be unchanging is, over a longer time horizon, seen to vary.

2. Tightly coupled: The actors in the system interact strongly with one another and with the natural world. Everything is connected to everything else.

3. Governed by feedback: Because of the tight coupling among the actors, our [solution] actions feed back on themselves. [This can cause unexpected reactions by the system to solutions. Systems will adapt.]

4. Nonlinear: Effect is rarely proportional to cause, and what happens locally in a system often does not apply in distant regions. [Cause and effect are not related by a straight line, like on a graph. The relationship is more often nonlinear, like exponential growth.]

5. History dependent: Taking one road often precludes taking others and determines where you end up (path dependence). Many actions are irreversible.

6. Self-organizing: The dynamics of systems arises spontaneously from their internal structure. [Due to] the feedbacks among the agents and elements of the system.

7. Adaptive: The capability and decision rules of the agents in complex systems change over time. Evolution leads to selection and proliferation of some agents while others become extinct. [Social agents will evolve to maximize their competitive advantage.]

8. Counterintuitive: In complex system cause and effect are distant in time and space, while we tend to look for causes near the events we seek to explain. Our attention is drawn to the symptoms of difficulty rather than the underlying cause. High leverage policies are often not obvious.

Right here John makes a tremendously insightful statement: “Our attention is drawn to the symptoms of difficulty rather than the underlying cause.” That's exactly what sustainability problem solvers have been doing. Due to lack of deep analysis, their attention has been drawn to the symptoms rather than their underlying root causes. This has resulted in a long string of symptomatic solutions, also called superficial solutions.

What should we do instead, since "high leverage policies are often not obvious?" John suggests that basically we need to model the problem in order to grasp its essential structure. Then the high leverage points solutions should push on will be obvious.

Complexity is the toughest thing systems thinking has to deal with. The behavior of a complex system emerges from its structure, or in more common terms, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Thus one helpful angle for grasping complexity is the concept of an emergent property.

As mentioned on the left in John Sterman's list, complex systems are counterintuitive. What you think will work as a solution too often doesn't. For a long treatment of this subject, see Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems by Jay Forrester. Here's the beginning of the paper:

“This paper addresses several issues of broad concern in the United States....

“The nation exhibits a growing sense of futility as it repeatedly attacks deficiencies in our social system while the symptoms continue to worsen. Legislation is debated and passed with great promise and hope. But many programs prove to be ineffective. Results often seem unrelated to those expected when the programs were planned. At times programs cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

“It is now possible to explain how such contrary results can happen. There are fundamental reasons why people misjudge the behavior of social systems. There are orderly processes at work in the creation of human judgment and intuition that frequently lead people to wrong decisions when faced with complex and highly interacting systems. Until we come to a much better understanding of social systems, we should expect that attempts to develop corrective programs will continue to disappoint us.

“The purpose of this paper is to leave with its readers a sense of caution about continuing to depend on the same past approaches that have led to our present feeling of frustration and to suggest an approach which can eventually lead to a better understanding of our social systems and thereby to more effective policies for guiding the future.”

The approach for “better understanding of our social systems” is of course systems dynamics, a method of modeling invented by Jay Forrester. This is the method we use for model based analysis since it works so well on social systems.

Are you as concerned as we are about the rise of populust authoritarians like Donald Trump? Have you noticed that democracy is unable to solve important problems like climate change, war, and poverty? If so this film series is for you!

Why is democracy in crisis? One intermediate cause is a weakened Voter Feedback Loop. Powerful root cause forces are working to weaken the loop.

The most eye-opening article on the site since it was written in December 2005. More people have contacted us about this easy to read paper and the related Dueling Loops videos than anything else on the site.

Do you every wonder why the sustainability problem is so impossibly hard to solve? It's because of the phenomenon of change resistance. The system itself, and not just individual social agents, is strongly resisting change. Why this is so, its root causes, and several potential solutions are presented.

The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:

Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.

The Universal Causal Chain

This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.

Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.

In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow.Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.

This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.

For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.

In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.

The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.

The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.

This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.

In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.

This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.

Solutions

There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.

Given the principle that all causal problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.

Summary of Solution Elements

Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:

Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.

The 4 Subproblems

The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.

Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.

Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.

The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.

This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.

B. How to Achieve Life Form Proper Coupling

In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.

What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.

The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.

The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.

Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.

This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.

Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.

This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.

Note how generic most of the tools/concepts are. They apply to far more than the sustainability problem. Thus the glossary is really The Problem Solver's Guide to Difficult Social System Problems, using the sustainability problem as a running example.